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Microsoft Urges US and EU To Follow Australian Digital News Code (theguardian.com) 88

Posted by BeauHD from the follow-in-their-footsteps dept.
Microsoft is calling for the US and the EU to follow Australia in introducing rules that require technology companies to share revenue with news organizations and support journalism. The Guardian reports: The company, which stood against Facebook and Google in supporting the proposal, argues that it is necessary to impose such a levy to create a level playing field between large tech firms and independent media organizations. Australia's proposal requires large technology companies to not only pay a fee for news content they use or link to, but to agree to partake in arbitration to determine that fee. In response, Facebook and Google threatened to pull services from the country, while Microsoft took the opposite tack: eagerly stepping up to promote Bing, which currently has fewer than one in 20 searches in Australia, as an alternative.

In a blog post, Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, said that he felt the Australian rule "deserves serious consideration, including in the United States." "Democracy has always started at the local level. Today, far too many local communities must nurture democracy without a fourth estate," Smith wrote. "As we know from our own experience with Microsoft's Bing search service, access to fresh, broad and deep news coverage is critical to retaining strong user engagement." "Our endorsement of Australia's approach has had immediate impact," Smith argued. "Within 24 hours, Google was on the phone with the prime minister, saying they didn't really want to leave the country after all. And the link on Google's search page with its threat to leave? It disappeared overnight. Apparently, competition does make a difference."

Smith says the change in U.S. government could be a chance for Washington to switch its position. "Facebook and Google persuaded the Trump administration to object to Australia's proposal. However, as the United States takes stock of the events on January 6 [the attack on the Capitol in Washington], it's time to widen the aperture. The ultimate question is what values we want the tech sector and independent journalism to serve. Yes, Australia's proposal will reduce the bargaining imbalance that currently favors tech gatekeepers and will help increase opportunities for independent journalism. But this a defining issue of our time that goes to the heart of our democratic freedoms."
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Microsoft Urges US and EU To Follow Australian Digital News Code More

Microsoft Urges US and EU To Follow Australian Digital News Code

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  • And my own content so I want $$$$ too

  • Right, it's Microsoft, the original evil empire.

    Yet, one of the power players lobbying against the others is the foundation of the free market theory that the market will regulate itself... not, by itself, a panacea against overreach by tech's biggest players, but in the absence of astute government oversite, it is something.

    • Microsoft is nothing compared to religion.
      • Yep, that's more of an Apple thing, if anything.

        • +1, Funny, but really, call me when Apple usees go murder others while having a big crazy smile on their faces... Cause that's kinda normal for true religions/cults.

          (INB4 iBelt with octanitrocubane "battery" XD)

    • it's Microsoft, the original evil empire.

      Standard Oil would like a word.

  • Since I consider most media today (Score:5, Insightful)

    by oldgraybeard ( 2939809 ) on Friday February 12, 2021 @09:36PM (#61058078)
    to just be political propaganda seems kinda like your requiting the peasants to pay for their own brain washing.

  • Yup democracy... (Score:3)

    by AlexHilbertRyan ( 7255798 ) on Friday February 12, 2021 @09:38PM (#61058086)
    I wonder how many Australians can call and talk to the PM just like that.
    • Any of the rich ones who have made the right political donations.
      • Yup indeed. Political parties in Australia are required to report donations. The reporting period lags about 18 months behind which is half a term of government. The effect of that is that you can never know who has them bought right now. It's amazing how cheap [abc.net.au] they sell themselves for.

        • And you seriously trust them to actually report it all? Why? Because you ask nicely? :D

          And come on, this is not the 80s. Who does bribery anymore? You only pay to elect one of your biggest believers (and the biggest tool), and then he goes on to work for you, not for money, but because he truly believes it.
          Bribery is for the losers from the competition who fail to brainwash that guy to switch sides, and want a favor anyway. Bribery is for beggars. Not choosers.

    • Call, few, just talk to, plenty if you can find him. Unlike the POTUS the PM doesn't traditionally hide behind an impenetrable wall of secret service. I remember years ago the outrage of some guy just going up and talking to our PM while he had a some kind of large gardening tool in his hand, I think it was a hedge trimmer or chainsaw or something. The media was pushing this as some major breach of security. The PM was like "WTF? it was just some guy who wanted to chat!"

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by skegg ( 666571 )

        I knew it was a schoolboy with a screwdriver working on his boat, but it was driving me nuts not remembering which PM it was.

        Found it: Screwdriver hug was no threat: Howard [smh.com.au]

        Prime Minister John Howard says he was not troubled by being spontaneously hugged by a schoolboy who was holding a screwdriver.

        Mr Howard was enjoying his morning walk along Melbourne's Yarra River on Wednesday, his 67th birthday, when Steve Battaglia, 16, raced over to hug him.

        Mr Battaglia, a member of the Carey Baptist Grammar's rowing club, had been adjusting his boat and was still holding a screwdriver when he embraced the prime minister.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by quenda ( 644621 )

      I wonder how many Australians can call and talk to the PM just like that.

      That's a bloody outrage, it is! I want to take this all the way to the Prime Minister. [youtube.com]
        Hey! Mr. Prime Minister! Andy!

  • Publicly funded news reporting (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jonsmirl ( 114798 ) on Friday February 12, 2021 @09:41PM (#61058096) Homepage

    If we want the public to finance news reporting then we should just pass a law and do it. Search engine companies should not be compelled to do this. If a search engine and the news entity can't come to terms, then don't do business with each other. Passing a law forcing one industry to subsidize another is not how capitalism works.

    If this bothers you pretend like the taxes Google pays are used to fund public journalism. If you then want to raise taxes on search engines, that's a different question.

  • Doesn't Google honor robots.txt anymore? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Because I thought that they were one of the good search engines that you could tell if you wanted your site indexed or not. So if you don't want it indexed by them, just tell them using the age old techniques that every webmaster should know.

    But telling them to index your site (for free) and then demanding that that they fork over money for traffic directed to you? No. Start paying them to index or find a way to sign a mutually beneficial partnership and then you can start asking for revenue share.

    If they

    • Re:Doesn't Google honor robots.txt anymore? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Luthair ( 847766 ) on Friday February 12, 2021 @09:55PM (#61058130)
      They do but a number of news sites want to have their cake (Google driving a significant portion of traffic to their sites) and eat it too (Google pay them for sending them customers).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by redback ( 15527 )

        yep.

        google should say WELL FINE THEN. and stop linking to them.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by nasch ( 598556 )

          The Australian proposal prohibits them from taking their ball home too. If I understand correctly, they would have to completely shut down all operations in Australia so that there is nothing for the government or courts to take from them in order to escape its requirements.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dwywit ( 1109409 )

            If they leave altogether, it doesn't bother me. I can use a VPN, and I'll be showing my customers how to get their google back. Even the toady telcos that bowed to banning P2P sites will be hesitant about blocking www.google.com

            Anything, ANYTHING that causes revenue pressure for NewsCorp is a net gain for the world.

            I drove past an LED billboard two days ago, touting the "experience" of the Australian Fox news team. Their experience lies in telling lies.

      • No, a lot of news sites what Google to index their sites to drive readers and not distill all the information into blurbs exclusively shown in Google's search results so no one goes on to their site.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Luthair ( 847766 )
          Except we know that isn't the case because when Germany & Spain tried this in 2013 & 2014 news sites took a huge hit in traffic. Quote from Spain's largest paper about Europe's recent attempts to enact a broader one:

          Those who want to make these rights a bastion from which to impose a mandatory and non-waivable fee are wrong. It is a model that has already proven its failure in Germany in 2013 and in Spain in 2014. Attempts to impose a mandatory fee on Google for the use of links to press news caused a major traffic drop Web of the group Axel Springer and the closing in Spain of the Google News service. /quote

    • > implying that "copyright" is sane

      You need to look into how that actually works, mate. Seriously. It is literally making a monopoly legal to make artificial scarcity and usury legal to make racketeering legal, and actually has nothing to do with creators, and everything with "distributors". You know... the industry that the Internet made obsolete, but somehow still exists, By The Power Of Greyskull^WCocaine.

  • All this does is drive inflation. Google spends money paying for news. So the cost of advertising on Google goes up. So the cost of the goods being advertised goes up. A quick check of history shows that wages have been flat for the last 40 years. We'll all have less money to spend on MS Office as our income buys less and less every year. Yep, great idea there Microsoft.

    • How is the cost of Google ads going to change in any way? How does Google's costs drive them? Because, I've used Google ads, and I don't see how that would even happen. Mechanism please.

      What really happens is that Google's profit margin goes slightly down.

      • What makes you think Google is going to just absorb that cost? Google is in business to make money, not to give the world free news.

        • What's the mechanism that Google will use to raise costs? Have you ever purchased online ads? They already charge the maximum the market will bear.

          • I suppose you mean RTB, yes it an auction marketplace. Google is charging a flat rate or or percentage of ad spend to use its platform, participation is not free. Google simply raises its fees, its cut of whatever the spend is in the auction.

    • Not quite.

      When the aggregators begin paying money for indexing news, the companies that actually write the news will be paid, and they'll be able to afford the writing tools Microsoft sells, and also write better news. People reading better news will make better choices. Life will become a tad better.

      Yep, maybe it isn't such a bad idea, even for Microsoft.

      Also, see how one-sided storytelling works both ways.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gtall ( 79522 )

        "'they'll be able to afford the writing tools Microsoft sells, and also write better news" I don't think there is a link between the two. My usual run in with MS tools ends badly in me swearing at their tools.

      • According to you in another thread, US news is just FUD and Government propaganda. It makes no sense that you'd want to fund more of it.

        There are a lot less journalists that win in your scenario than there are readers that do not gain financially. The trend is still downward after all.

        No one in this thread has explained why companies like Google would simply absorb the cost rather than passing the cost on to their revenue streams. Google does not exist to bring you free news. Follow the money.

  • huh? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    the f*ck? we have to pay to link to stuff? why stop at news media. if you link to my knitting webpage I want money too.

    • No, not to link, but Google included several sentences from every news reports as well. That is copyright infringement.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by nasch ( 598556 )

        Since when? Who has been found liable for copyright infringement for doing that?

        • See the links in TFS! Australia's been trying to make it happen for a while now. Not every country works the same way as the US. Pragmatically speaking, small-scale journalism is an industry in danger of collapse without some kind of economic intervention, so regardless of the legal basis or mechanism for doing so, society really will be better off if we find some way to bail it out.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by nasch ( 598556 )

            Yeah I know Australia has been trying to do it, but the other commenter said it IS copyright infringement, not that it might become so at some point. So, is it currently against copyright law in some jurisdiction? If so, where?

            so regardless of the legal basis or mechanism for doing so, society really will be better off if we find some way to bail it out.

            I agree, but I very much doubt this proposal is the best way to do it.

            • Google stopped showing news results from European publishers on search results for French users last year after local regulators urged it to pay for content, and then on Thursday [January 21, 2021] the firm said it reached a deal to pay media publishers in the country. In 2014, it shuttered Google News in Spain following new copyright legislation.

      • False, that is Fair Use. Look it up.

        • Not if it is a service designed to get you "all news in one place", as Google does, and you don't ever go to the source for most of the stuff you read there.

          • PROTIP: If your "news" is so shitty, that taking the first three lines makes people never even go to your site, *it's not worth money*. Don't you have the concept of a threshold of originality over there?

          • Hahaha, if a sentence or two conveys everything the news site sucks and has nothing to say.

            It's fair use and fine, which is why google and other sites have been doing it for years. There is no problem.

  • nobody mentions Murdoch ? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by swell ( 195815 ) <jabberwock@poetic.com> on Friday February 12, 2021 @10:00PM (#61058138)

    I thought the Australian law was specifically intended to protect Rupert Murdoch's news empire. Is MS in bed with Murdoch or just trying to annoy Google? Seem to recall that Murdoch owns a huge percentage of the news sources available to citizens there.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by BladeMelbourne ( 518866 )

      The reason Microsoft is urging this is because Google has threatened to pull search out of Australia, which suddenly makes Bing usage more likely.

      If I recall, Google has about 95% search dominance in Australia.

      So Microsoft's real motivation here is purely their own greed - it's not about the payment stream of news companies.

    • Re:nobody mentions Murdoch ? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Samantha Wright ( 1324923 ) on Friday February 12, 2021 @11:51PM (#61058348) Homepage Journal
      You're missing the point rather badly here: Microsoft sees something that's harmful to Google in Australia and wants it exported to the US and EU. The beneficiaries of the Australian law aren't really an object of consideration. I suppose you could say that it'll help Fox News and other right-wing media in those markets as well, and considering how dependent they've been on Facebook for traffic they'll probably gain much more from this development than other news outlets in the same countries. But given that these same sites were responsible for inventing and perpetuating conspiracies about Bill Gates putting evil tracking devices in vaccines, it's rather hard to fathom any sort of values-based alignment between MS and the Murdochs.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by swell ( 195815 )

        "Microsoft sees something that's harmful to Google in Australia and wants it exported to the US and EU."

        MS knows that's not gonna happen. Maybe in Tragikistan or Slobbovia. It could only happen in Australia because Murdoch owns the government. And even there, the citizens won't tolerate Bing; they'll storm the capital.

    • Huge percentage? From what I've seen, it's pretty much 100%, and then some. (You can own things *twice* :D)

    • Re:nobody mentions Murdoch ? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Saturday February 13, 2021 @07:17AM (#61058842)

      Is MS in bed with Murdoch or just trying to annoy Google?

      Don't look for conspiracy theories where there are none. MS sees a PR move in an unrelated battle between it's competitor and a news company and is capitalising on it. Nothing more.

      It's called marketing.

  • Yes (Score:2)

    by MeNeXT ( 200840 )

    So Microsoft should pay people to use Windows and Office as well. No? It only makes sense when it's not your business model.

  • The issue is not only linking (Score:5, Informative)

    by stikves ( 127823 ) on Friday February 12, 2021 @10:41PM (#61058212) Homepage

    If the issue was linking, I think some sort of compromise would be possible, however:

    https://about.google/google-in... [about.google]

    1) They define "news" vaguely

    "In this proposed law, “news” is defined vaguely and broadly—way beyond what most of us would consider “news”. There seems to be no clear or obvious distinction between news and non-news content, and the way that Google works, there is no algorithm that could navigate such a vague and broad definition.

    2) They can ask for any price:

    Unfair and unprecedented arbitration process: It imposes an unfair and unprecedented baseball arbitration model that considers only publishers’ costs, not Google’s and incentivises publishers to make enormous and unreasonable demands.

    Basically, I can say "my blog was a news site, and you need to pay my hosting fees", and if the arbiter agrees, there is no negotiation or appeal. Any website becomes a potential time bomb.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'm going through my personal blog templates to make sure I can disable all outside href's in case this law does pass.

      It's just a personal blog but whenever I start a project and make something, I always link to the youtube videos and other maker sites I initially got inspiration from or for code I used in the project.

      The AU law defines this as linking to news, and even if not to a .au or .eu domain, if the site is in the eu/au they can invoice me when I add in a link.

      Worse, if I link to a github repo, it d

  • I wonder if Microsoft will be so enthusiastic when they have to pay every time someone shares a news link on LinkedIn (which they own). It's an open-ended liability unless they limit/restrict linking in Australia.

  • At least in my country, Edge's start page and other Microsoft news widgets are often full with clickbait / populist / emotional / incendiary content. They center so much on negative emotions or clickbait titles that I disable them, otherwise they'd ruin my mood, being the first thing that I see when I turn on the PC, and something that constantly falls under my eyes while I work. And they're automatically configured to show up on every Windows desktop, without anyone asking. I don't think they're doing anyt

  • Slashdot copies a lot of the original article, would it have to pay sites?

  • it's time to widen the aperture.

    In photography that would put focus on a smaller part of the subject, blurring the rest of the picture.

  • Don't like both, but I strongly hope Google will fight this battle and destroy Murochs evil empire. That is what this really is about.

  • Two step solution, no government money needs to be spent.

    1. Google should drop all links to any and all websites purporting to be "news".
    2. Google should offer a contract to those websites wanting relisted.

    Done.

  • You're missing two important phrases:

    ... requires large technology companies ...

    and

    ... for news content they use ...

    The rules on linking are a little vague but the purpose of this bill is to prevent Google and Facebook displaying content and calling their piracy a 'link'.

    So everyone else, calm your tits, it's not about you.

  • you don't have say in this for you do it only for bing which we all hate.

  • WWW value is to link to other documents online.

    Considering that definitions of "news" and "large company" is always disputable it would break the web, no?

    And solutions already exists:
    If a site does not want to be linked to, make it a paywall?
    If "large companies" quote too much of somebody's else content would it not fall into existing copyright law?

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